Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series
Project/Paper: Please see Ziyaad’s work at ziyaadbhorat.com
Bio: Ziyaad Bhorat is a South African political theorist of technology and postdoctoral fellow with the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life (STPL), United States, the Berggruen Institute, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights. His interdisciplinary work examines automation as both i) a transformational development in human history and ii) an underexamined precondition for advanced technologies like AI. His research projects explore the classical foundations and policy implications of challenges to democracy like digital authoritarianism and the emergence of a political right to freedom from automated technologies. Ziyaad’s work has been published in academic and general audience outlets across the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa on topics ranging from Aristotle to AI judges. His PhD was awarded from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), United States in 2022, where he also received his MA. He also holds an MBA and an MSc from the University of Oxford, UK, studying there as a Rhodes Scholar and a BBusSci from the University of Cape Town. He has been a visiting scholar at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France, and lectures on technology and politics for EquiTech Futures. He has worked in media and telecoms, consulting for companies like The Walt Disney Company.
Topic: The digital world is one built on the automation of data processing. But is it also built on slavery? I want to offer a conception of digital despotism that aims to balance the appeal to the language of slavery in recent postcolonial discourses on digital technology while distinguishing itself from slavery’s material violence. By perturbing the theory of one of the most radically excluded categories of human existence, Aristotle’s natural slave, we can appropriate digital despotism as a syndrome of overlapping risks to human impairment, brought about by the advent of automated data processing technologies, which dispossesses people along i) ontological and ii) cognitive dimensions.
How Ataya works: One presenter and their work – in exchange with the audience. Each Ataya session engages with selected work by the presenter (a text, artwork, performance, even food). The presenter introduces their work and grounds the subsequent discussion with the participants. For best engagement, we recommend participants to view the work (made available in advance on our website) before the session. More on the Ataya Series
